6 ms·

I wholeheartedly agree with you. Unfortunately, the commercial desktop OS market is a duopoly. Either we must deal with Windows and its shenanigans, or we mus

I wholeheartedly agree with you. Unfortunately, the commercial desktop OS market is a duopoly. Either we must deal with Windows and its shenanigans, or we must deal with macOS and its drawbacks (the chief ones being limited hardware choices, soldered RAM and storage, and highly inflated prices for RAM and storage upgrades). Switching to Linux or the BSDs is an option for some people, but what about those who rely on software that is only available on Windows and macOS? Having to choose between Windows and the Mac has been the situation since the late 1990s. There hasn’t been any strong commercial challengers to these operating systems since the demise of BeOS.

mrkeen 2y ago
> but what about those who rely on software that is only available on Windows and macOS? No-one ever considers the dual of this: if you started using Linux, what software would be so vital that you couldn't consider switching to windows?
- mamcx 2y ago
  The most brutal category of all is ERPs/Accounting packages ... and Office.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  Rockwell Studio 5000. FactoryTalk View Studio. Autodesk Electrical. Autodesk Inventor. Fanuc Roboguide. This package is part of the pay-to-play entry barrier in my industrial controls industry. My quotes don't win jobs if I can't use these tools. None of these very expensive (the above items add up to more than $25,000, not even counting the subscription fees), closed source applications have native Linux installers or have any hope to run in Wine. I run a Linux host OS with Windows VMs for the various incompatible versions of these pieces of software that I have to keep around to maintain old equipment, but these software packages are only available on Windows. Fortunately, the industry has embraced Windows 10 LTSC (in machines where we're not still running Windows CE 6.0, LOL), so I'm good through at least 2032.
  - DEADMINCE 2y ago
    > or have any hope to run in Wine. Why not?
- lamontcg 2y ago
  Funny how your responses are proving your point that nobody can even think about that.
mvkel 2y ago
Why is limited hardware choice a drawback? Like is anyone wishing they had an Intel chip in their MacBook instead of an M3? I "choose" longer battery life, and maximal computing load, both of which are only really optimizable when you vertically integrate hardware and software
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  What you can't choose: NVIDIA card, having a desktop instead of a laptop, all kinds of stuff you can put inside that desktop...
- FpUser 2y ago
  And I do not give a flying fuck about battery life since I work in my home office only for the last 20 years and mostly deal with desktops and laptops configured just the way I want. So what works for you is not always what works for me.
  - mvkel 2y ago
    Sure. But would you say your usage of a laptop is the typical use case? Using it as a permanent desktop? If you were going to design a laptop from scratch for a market, would you optimize it for your example?
    - justsomehnguy 2y ago
      > Sure. But would you say your usage of a laptop is the typical use case? Using it as a permanent desktop? Guess you never saw 15.6" laptops in your whole life. Like come on, my 14", 1.2kg is a thing what even I (185cm, 110kg) sometimes find exhausting to handle and I'm not always with it. If my work depended on it 24/7 I would go for 12" or even less. Yet vendors are constantly make those 15" or 17" 2-3kg monstruosities, mraning there is a demand for it. Try walking in their shoes, I guess?
      - mvkel 2y ago
        I'm not sure what your point is. Big, heavy laptops are heavy, so they should be desktops? I've got great news: guess who makes the lightest laptops in the world? Know why they're so light? Vertical integration. As an aside, if carrying 1.2kg is "exhausting to handle," I'm not sure what will convince you of any point on this topic.
sakjur 2y ago
I feel like the practical duopoly would be one thing if we were back around Vista/7 and Apple’s kittens, but the awful thing about both Microsoft and Apple these days is that they’re not happy with just selling software or hardware, they also really want to push their services, making it harder and harder to escape M365 or iCloud, with Microsoft going so far as to make it a convoluted process involving the command-line and a restart to even allow offline accounts on Home/Pro.
- linguae 2y ago
  This is true. I’m thinking about contributing to open source projects, perhaps even starting one, to further help with developing alternatives to “Big Tech” and their increasing levels of control on personal computing.
moffkalast 2y ago
Linux isn't much better either these days, with the same shenanigans leaking in like cancer for no reason. Every time I forget to kill and purge unattended-upgrade on some Ubuntu install it ends up messing up my system at some later point because apt just can't keep its grubby little hands of my fucking packages. The other day it broke Nvidia drivers on one machine which took me a while to fix. Sometimes it'll just decide it needs to run an update for something e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y-s-l-o-w-l-y while blocking all apt installs for like an hour if you happen to be on slow wifi. Canonical's worst design decision by far, and that list includes picking Gnome as their desktop environment.
- pdonis 2y ago
  There are distros that don't have the same problems (and I will probably be switching to one the next time I have to configure a new Linux machine, since Ubuntu, as you say, is getting way out of hand). That's one of the nice things about Linux.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    I'm sure there are, but like those Windows users I'm unfortunately locked to flavors of Ubuntu by ROS and some other software. Kubuntu is generally pretty nice once you take out the trash and add the missing bits. At least it stays configurable enough to fix for now.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
pdonis 2y ago
> the commercial desktop OS market is a duopoly No, it's not. I've been happily running Linux on my personal machines for more than two decades. > what about those who rely on software that is only available on Windows and macOS? Matlab is the software in question in this particular case, and as others have already posted, it runs on Linux. Even for particular software that might be Windows/Mac only, there are almost always functional equivalents that run on Linux. For example, OpenOffice (and later LibreOffice, which is what I run now) as an alternative to MS Office. I have had plenty of opportunity for comparison because, for all the time I have been running Linux on my personal machines, I have had to use Windows at work. I have always had much more hassle with my work machines, and if I had a dollar for every time I have had the thought that, if only my employer would switch to Linux on desktops, my work life would be so much easier and my productivity would be better, I'd be retired now. And that's not even counting all the times I have had the thought that if my employer would run Linux on servers instead of Microsoft crapware, our IT infrastructure would be so much more robust. The one example I have seen in this discussion of software that is truly limited to Windows/Mac is Solidworks. But that's a particular product for a particular niche, not a general office application.
- normalaccess 2y ago
  I switched to Linux full time two years ago and I'm never looking back (until a "trusted" OS is required by law). There are times when I truly need windows for something so I keep it around on a spare HDD to boot into it. In the future I plan on relegating it to a VM on a separate VLAN to keep the cooties at bay.
  - GuB-42 2y ago
    > There are times when I truly need windows for something so I keep it around on a spare HDD to boot into it. That's the problem. Most Linux users need Windows for something. I use mostly Linux, but I also have a Windows boot partition. For things like gaming, Fusion 360, VR,... Some things don't work that well on Linux: YouTube sometimes gets out of sync, print quality is really bad,... On the other hand, I don't really need Linux, except for jobs that involve Linux specifically, and these are pretty technical jobs, far from a typical use case for non tech workers. And even with such tech jobs, >90% of these cases could be dealt with with WSL. There is a video by LinuxTechTips where he tries to go 100% Linux, he is relatively successful but it is painful. I love this video because I think it is representative of the experience of a computer-savvy consumer. On the other hand, if auto-restarts are a real problem to you, you are probably not a typical user. For most, it is an annoyance, but not really a problem, and it can be important for security. I don't really mind them personally, except that my dual-boot machine restarts on Linux (the default) when Windows does that, with the update process paused half way, annoying.

mrkeen 2y ago

> but what about those who rely on software that is only available on Windows and macOS? No-one ever considers the dual of this: if you started using Linux, what software would be so vital that you couldn't consider switching to windows?

mamcx 2y ago
The most brutal category of all is ERPs/Accounting packages ... and Office.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
LeifCarrotson 2y ago
Rockwell Studio 5000. FactoryTalk View Studio. Autodesk Electrical. Autodesk Inventor. Fanuc Roboguide. This package is part of the pay-to-play entry barrier in my industrial controls industry. My quotes don't win jobs if I can't use these tools. None of these very expensive (the above items add up to more than $25,000, not even counting the subscription fees), closed source applications have native Linux installers or have any hope to run in Wine. I run a Linux host OS with Windows VMs for the various incompatible versions of these pieces of software that I have to keep around to maintain old equipment, but these software packages are only available on Windows. Fortunately, the industry has embraced Windows 10 LTSC (in machines where we're not still running Windows CE 6.0, LOL), so I'm good through at least 2032.
- DEADMINCE 2y ago
  > or have any hope to run in Wine. Why not?
lamontcg 2y ago
Funny how your responses are proving your point that nobody can even think about that.

mvkel 2y ago

Why is limited hardware choice a drawback? Like is anyone wishing they had an Intel chip in their MacBook instead of an M3? I "choose" longer battery life, and maximal computing load, both of which are only really optimizable when you vertically integrate hardware and software

dist-epoch 2y ago
What you can't choose: NVIDIA card, having a desktop instead of a laptop, all kinds of stuff you can put inside that desktop...
FpUser 2y ago
And I do not give a flying fuck about battery life since I work in my home office only for the last 20 years and mostly deal with desktops and laptops configured just the way I want. So what works for you is not always what works for me.
- mvkel 2y ago
  Sure. But would you say your usage of a laptop is the typical use case? Using it as a permanent desktop? If you were going to design a laptop from scratch for a market, would you optimize it for your example?
  - justsomehnguy 2y ago
    > Sure. But would you say your usage of a laptop is the typical use case? Using it as a permanent desktop? Guess you never saw 15.6" laptops in your whole life. Like come on, my 14", 1.2kg is a thing what even I (185cm, 110kg) sometimes find exhausting to handle and I'm not always with it. If my work depended on it 24/7 I would go for 12" or even less. Yet vendors are constantly make those 15" or 17" 2-3kg monstruosities, mraning there is a demand for it. Try walking in their shoes, I guess?
    - mvkel 2y ago
      I'm not sure what your point is. Big, heavy laptops are heavy, so they should be desktops? I've got great news: guess who makes the lightest laptops in the world? Know why they're so light? Vertical integration. As an aside, if carrying 1.2kg is "exhausting to handle," I'm not sure what will convince you of any point on this topic.

sakjur 2y ago

I feel like the practical duopoly would be one thing if we were back around Vista/7 and Apple’s kittens, but the awful thing about both Microsoft and Apple these days is that they’re not happy with just selling software or hardware, they also really want to push their services, making it harder and harder to escape M365 or iCloud, with Microsoft going so far as to make it a convoluted process involving the command-line and a restart to even allow offline accounts on Home/Pro.

linguae 2y ago
This is true. I’m thinking about contributing to open source projects, perhaps even starting one, to further help with developing alternatives to “Big Tech” and their increasing levels of control on personal computing.

moffkalast 2y ago

Linux isn't much better either these days, with the same shenanigans leaking in like cancer for no reason. Every time I forget to kill and purge unattended-upgrade on some Ubuntu install it ends up messing up my system at some later point because apt just can't keep its grubby little hands of my fucking packages. The other day it broke Nvidia drivers on one machine which took me a while to fix. Sometimes it'll just decide it needs to run an update for something e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y-s-l-o-w-l-y while blocking all apt installs for like an hour if you happen to be on slow wifi. Canonical's worst design decision by far, and that list includes picking Gnome as their desktop environment.

pdonis 2y ago
There are distros that don't have the same problems (and I will probably be switching to one the next time I have to configure a new Linux machine, since Ubuntu, as you say, is getting way out of hand). That's one of the nice things about Linux.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  I'm sure there are, but like those Windows users I'm unfortunately locked to flavors of Ubuntu by ROS and some other software. Kubuntu is generally pretty nice once you take out the trash and add the missing bits. At least it stays configurable enough to fix for now.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

pdonis 2y ago

> the commercial desktop OS market is a duopoly No, it's not. I've been happily running Linux on my personal machines for more than two decades. > what about those who rely on software that is only available on Windows and macOS? Matlab is the software in question in this particular case, and as others have already posted, it runs on Linux. Even for particular software that might be Windows/Mac only, there are almost always functional equivalents that run on Linux. For example, OpenOffice (and later LibreOffice, which is what I run now) as an alternative to MS Office. I have had plenty of opportunity for comparison because, for all the time I have been running Linux on my personal machines, I have had to use Windows at work. I have always had much more hassle with my work machines, and if I had a dollar for every time I have had the thought that, if only my employer would switch to Linux on desktops, my work life would be so much easier and my productivity would be better, I'd be retired now. And that's not even counting all the times I have had the thought that if my employer would run Linux on servers instead of Microsoft crapware, our IT infrastructure would be so much more robust. The one example I have seen in this discussion of software that is truly limited to Windows/Mac is Solidworks. But that's a particular product for a particular niche, not a general office application.

normalaccess 2y ago
I switched to Linux full time two years ago and I'm never looking back (until a "trusted" OS is required by law). There are times when I truly need windows for something so I keep it around on a spare HDD to boot into it. In the future I plan on relegating it to a VM on a separate VLAN to keep the cooties at bay.
- GuB-42 2y ago
  > There are times when I truly need windows for something so I keep it around on a spare HDD to boot into it. That's the problem. Most Linux users need Windows for something. I use mostly Linux, but I also have a Windows boot partition. For things like gaming, Fusion 360, VR,... Some things don't work that well on Linux: YouTube sometimes gets out of sync, print quality is really bad,... On the other hand, I don't really need Linux, except for jobs that involve Linux specifically, and these are pretty technical jobs, far from a typical use case for non tech workers. And even with such tech jobs, >90% of these cases could be dealt with with WSL. There is a video by LinuxTechTips where he tries to go 100% Linux, he is relatively successful but it is painful. I love this video because I think it is representative of the experience of a computer-savvy consumer. On the other hand, if auto-restarts are a real problem to you, you are probably not a typical user. For most, it is an annoyance, but not really a problem, and it can be important for security. I don't really mind them personally, except that my dual-boot machine restarts on Linux (the default) when Windows does that, with the update process paused half way, annoying.